Learn how to play the sponsorship game

I got on the phone with Shehmeer of HackGT's organizing team. I was familiar with their event back in 2013 (it went down in September 2014) because they pitched me for sponsorship at the seed accelerator where I worked ... over 11 months in advance of their event. The HackGT team attracting over 1000 students to their event, ran volunteering seamlessly, and event had healthy snacks, winning the nickname SnackGT. Shemeer is a triple threat who can throw events, communicate in a world class fashion (take notes!), produce electronic music, and more.

I saw down with Josh, Casey, and Sidney, organizers of HackCC, to talk about hackathon planning, marketing, logistics, and their most uncertain moments as organizers. We talk about lessons learned, frustrations, and ultimately the plan for next year. (Organizer Ahmed was not present)

I got on Skype with Matt Haines, who runs the community for Electric Imp. Electric Imp was founded in 2011 and is a heavyweight innovator in the Internet of Things. Matt started as a software developer in Regina, Saskatchewan (Canada) and evolved into a hardware hacker-turned developer evangelist.

This is a great interview because we talk about the unique challenges of hardware hacking and the future of education, and how hackathons fit.

Shownotes:

Brief overview of Matt’s background

Matt studied CS in University

Started a Hackerspace called CrashBang labs (in Saskatchewan, Canada) which is what eventually led to joining Electric Imp

David Gherhardt - was a professor who Matt knew, and between them they rounded up 10 people

Matt’s Least favorite type of hackathon are the hypercompetitive ones- Salesforce/Angelhack, etc are very exclusionary in who they attract and who can participate.

A huge problem with competitive events is that they focus too much on product, not enough on process.

As a company it’s better to be involved in a collaborative or themed hackathons - more opportunities to mentor and interact with participants.

How can you measure the benefits you’re getting from a hackathon?

Electric Imp has very different goals than most software companies who sponsor

Hardware has much higher upfront cost

For that reason, Electric Imp focuses on recruiting interns/new hires, debugging their own product and docs, and to see where things go wrong with your product

Tell me about a great event you’ve been to in the past year

MLH hackathons - trend is that they are getting better. Organizers are getting more skilled at logistics. And importantly, organizers are figuring out how to handle hardware hacking versus a big focus on software

What are some challenges specifically for hardware hacks?

Classic problems - If there is no soldering iron you can’t solder, no way around it. If you need an accelerometer you can’t just download one as you may be able to with software hacks.

Some hackathons are now providing reimbursements for people that bring their own hardware

Definition of Hardware hacking is vague - projects that use Oculus or Myo armband are not necessarily hardware hacking. You’re just working with the SDK and adding that to your software.

Throw a hackathon vs sponsor one - Which choice is better for a company who wants to get involved?

Depends on the outcome you are looking for - think about why you would be doing either

Sponsoring is probably better for evangelism

Your own hackathons, if you do one, should be based around a specific theme or provider (to illustrate the power of two techs combined) - for example, Electric Imp has done collaborations with Firebase and Pubnub

How to choose another sponsorship - partnerships where you are trying to build something for their technology stack, balancing with how it will benefit our users and community

Do you think hackathons will play a role in the future of education?

MLH hackathons - CS doesn’t teach you how to be a software developer, it teaches you how the systems work

Hackathons can sit in the middle between theoretical learning and practical learning, between University and Code Schools

To maximize the benefit of hackathons you probably should already be an autodidact

A huge benefit is being able to interact with likeminded folks outside of the classroom

Matt enjoyed his work/study degree, found working inside of companies and getting mentors to be highly useful

Electric Imp is headed to RobotsConf this weekend - same orgs as NodeBots and JSConf

There is an open source hardware robot kit called SumoBot - you can send CAD files to a Maker Space - has different components and is as easy as legos to build. Just need to control the servos. People are doing it with Arduinos, we replace it with electric imp

I got on Skype for a chat with Ossama Alami, who heads up developer advocacy at Firebase. Firebase is a realtime backend service which is very popular at hackathons. Over 125,000 developers worldwide use Firebase, which is now an independent team within after an October 2014 acquisition.

Shownotes:

Brief overview of Ossama’s background

Ossama’s first company was acquired by Accenture - he took his tech + consulting background to developer relations at Google (Ads, Geo, Commerce, and Glass)

Transitioned over to Firebase from Google, becoming the VP of Developer Happiness

Ossama met the Firebase team via introduction by mutual acquaintances, clicked with James and Andrew the two founders and the rest of the team

Brief overview of Firebase

Firebase’s API lets you store and synch data in realtime

Firebase allows you to build powerful and collaborative tools only using front-end code.

Firebase shines with real-time applications - , building a realtime infra (for chat or is hard, but Firebase lets you create it quickly

Having data from Keen allows companies to make better decisions, and Keen also powers customer-facing visualization.

Game developers, IoT, wearables are heavy adopters

What does a dev evangelist do?

#1 responsibility is to help people and make friends.

(usually helping developers)

For Keen, evangelism isn’t about the actual product

Dev Evangelism communicates that your product is investing long term - building a product on top of an API that subsequently dies is a huge pain

It’s difficult to capture the concrete ROI behind evangelism (ironic that an analytics company has trouble tracking benefit :)

How long have you been running your Dev Evangelism program

SG evangelism program was at scale. at scale much of the uncertainty is dissipated and it’s about executing efficiently.

Working for Keen is interesting to Tim because early stage Evangelism is all about getting your footing.

Evangelism helps your company figuring out what’s right for the community you serve

goals are also different at a more mature program

up front your company hasn’t established a collective input from everyone that matters

Evangelism’s goal is to rep the people behind the product so they buy our team, not our product

When hiring your first evangelist -- even though they travel a lot, have them relocate home base to where your team is

Concrete benefit of evangelism is product feedback - going out to hackathons/meetups creates a feedback loop for your company about critical issues like user onboarding, docs, signup process, time to first API call

Internal Hackathons

It’s very rewarding to do internal events (when done right :)

Keen took an offsite to costa rica - week together in the house as 30 people - and on the rainiest day of the week threw an internal hackathon

Wrong way to do a an internal hackathon - do it to squeeze more productivity and ‘get shit done’

Right way - work on whatever you want - learn a new tech, solve a fun or a serious problem, get to know your team

Why hackathons are powerful - Job and school are results driven. Hackathons should be a break from that pressure.

When hiring, Tim skips resume and looks for passion projects - important for dev evangelists is projects built for fun… that is a major checkmark

What is an API or product (not your own) that you love?

Interesting category is search for developers

Clarify.io / URX - these two search API’s allow you to index different media for much cooler experience

Tim likes the collaborative focused ones. It’s better to fun in an open ended environment, doesn’t matter who’s on your team etc

Competitive hackathon gets away from what hackathons really are. They really are coding competitions. TC Disrupt is the only major competitive hackathon that preserves the essence of what hackathons are.

Themed ones are really fun… Comedy hack day is probably the most entertaining one you could go to. It’s possibly there is a lack of innovation at themed hackathons. Lot of repetition and tunnel vision. Constraints stifle creativity. This is to say that Themed hackathons have room to improve, not that they’re a bad thing .

Organizers mistakenly think having no constraints is a bad thing for a hackathon. Randomness is a feature, not a bug - leads to black swan solutions.

Tell me about a great event you’ve been to in the past year

October - Brooklyn Beta. It is a conference targeted towards artists and designers, with real focus on people at the event and quality of those people. It was kept small. Cool thing is BB was hosted in an art gallery (nonstandard venue). didn’t have internet provided. BB intentionally didn’t announce speakers and had only one track.

Tim organized Boulder Beta (unrelated to Brooklyn beta)

LA should throw a Brooklyn-Beta-esque

Throw a hackathon vs sponsor one - Which choice is better for a company who wants to get involved?

Don’t throw an event before you’re experienced as a sponsor - you probably aren’t ready.

Do you think hackathons/accelerators will play a role in the future of education?

Hackathons are acting as supplement to education for devs. Also supplement to social interaction - meet ‘your people’ over weekend events - friends, future employers, etc.

hackathon can also be thought of as continuing education on top of its benefits for primary education

Also can hone your dev skills at accelerator, but the focus of accelerators is on entrepreneurship. Accelerators help you get more confident and to learn by doing. (Tim was already in MBA program before accelerators were ‘a thing’)

Accelerators are softening the risk of ‘taking the plunge’ into entrep and providing extra resources that didn’t exist before.

Dev Evanglism has yet to be explored by the majority of companies. Still, now it’s a ‘thing’, and a job listed on career pages. It’s an opportunity to grow beyond just writing code. People have had this role for several years and now moving.

Throw a hackathon vs sponsor one - Which choice is better for a company who wants to get involved?

A major tenet of evangelism is meet people where they are, so you should sponsor first …

You’re out of your tree if you want to throw a hackathon before having been to a few

(John helps hackathons with organization/sponsors - hit me up!)

It makes sense to throw your hackathon if it has a theme

Do you think hackathons will play a role in the future of education?

Going to hackathons really helps your career!

Technical screening - Jen has asked “what is the hardest problem you’ve had to solve?” - she hears the same answer over and over (taken from CS term projects) - when a hackathon goer talks about something they’ve built they immediately stand out

Checkout developer.pagerduty.com for more example - PD tries to help with Open Source

Pagerduty has a pilot program to sponsor “bug bounties” to encourage more developer engagement

people who build something for themselves aren’t focusing on deployment for other people - main idea is to reward people for going final 20% of the way and making their code deployable for other people

How to keep support excited? What is their reward for taking care of business

Their job isn’t trivial

Main motivation is to crush it, doesn’t matter how that gets done, just that it is happening

Lob’s mission is to transform bits into atoms - they make it easy to do that with their API, which powers companies’ paper mail via software. Lob is a graduate of Y Combinator S’13 and took venture from First Round Capital, Polaris, and Floodgate.

Q: Tell me briefly about your background

I Graduated from the University of Michigan in 2011.

After graduatiing, I went to work as a derivatives trader on Wall street.

In 2012 I left to start my first startup in Michigan - after that I moved to Seattle to work for Amazon Web Services.

After AWS I founded Lob and participated in Y Combinator’s Summer 2013 Batch.

Q: What does a dev evangelist do?

A dev evangelist attends developer-focused events to evangelize his/her product and to help participants with technical problems they face.

The role of a dev evangelist is both to serve as a mentor and also to help guide teams to build a successful product. Guidance can be in the form of recommending tools to use, answering technical related questions, or helping architect a weekend hack.

Q: What did you work on before you became a dev evangelist?

A: Before starting Lob, I was a Technical Business Developer Representative at Amazon Web Services.

Q: How long have you been running your Dev Evangelism program:

A: We have been running our Dev Evangelism program since we graduated Y Combinator in 2013. We have been attending hackathons ever since.

Q: What is an API or product (not your own) that you love?

Stripe. The documentation is crystal clear and their wrappers are constantly being updated. They have great wrappers on github and I can get Stripe integrated and running within a few minutes.

Q: What is your favorite hackathon format?

I like the competitive hackathons best. Competition incentivizes people to build amazing products. Competition fosters creativity and pushes people to create the best hacks.

Q: Tell me about a great event you’ve been to in the past year

YC hacks was pretty epic. There was a diverse and extremely talented crowd.

Not only were the hacks amazing but the mentorship, creativity, and overall atmosphere was at a higher caliber than other events I have been too.

Q: Throw a hackathon vs sponsor one - Which choice is better for a company who wants to get involved?

For a company just starting out, I would suggest sponsoring a hackathon. This will make hackers aware of your product and also allow you to get acclimated to the hacker community. This will also allow you to understand the fundamentals of a hackathon and see first hand what it takes to make a successful event.

Once you have been to 2-3 and have built up a reputation in the hackathon community than you can throw one yourself.

Q: Do you think hackathons are the future of education?

Hackathons have their place in education. They are a great complement to education but they cannot replace it.

A hackathon won’t teach you the fundamentals of programming but it will allow to experiment with new software and learn from the brightest peers around you. If you combine both you are bound for success.

Q: Where do the you see the dev evangelism scene evolving to?

I see the dev evangelism scene as the main way companies interact with top talent. The relationship between companies and young developers is constantly evolving. More and more dev evangelists are becoming mentors to these young developers and guiding them to their first job or startup.

Eventually, dev evangelists will be thought leaders and hackers will look upto these evangelists for guidance, career advice, and to access to top tier tech firms. The dev evangelists are the gatekeepers as they can see the potential of young developers.

Q: Anything (product, API, idea) you want to plug?

Yes, hackers should take a look at the lob.com API (lob.com). For experienced hackers lob is a great API to add to your tool belt.

We are also looking for talented engineers to help build the future of APIs for the enterprise.